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1. The Infinite Number of Things That Can Go Wrong with the Hearts of New People
- Oregon State University Press
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7 1. The Infinite Number of Things That Can Go Wrong with the Hearts of New People Doctor Dave McIrvin is slight and thin and intense and smiling and one of those puzzling human creatures who while they are talking to you seem to have all the time in the universe, and look you right in the eye, and answer your questions directly and straightforwardly, and listen to what you say, and don’t listen impatiently waiting for you to finish what foolish thing you are saying so they can tell you what wise thing they know, but as soon as you are finished talking to Dave he is gone like a cat. He just is gone. It’s the most amazing thing you ever saw. Because he is a doctor he almost always is wearing green scrubs so if you pay attention and watch carefully when he begins to be gone you see a greenish whir and blur in the air, topped by Dave’s grin, and then the vision and Dave are both gone, and you are standing there thinking that old Lewis Carroll knew what he was talking about when he invented the Cheshire Cat. * Dave is a pediatric cardiologist. Kids call him Doctor Dave, or Doccor Dave, or just Dave. One time a kid called him a cardio pediologist. He looks like he might be thirty years old but he came into the world in California fifty years ago. His dad ran a pest-control service and his mom helped his dad run the pest-control service and she also raised Dave and his older brother Art. the wet engine 8 Was Dave a good boy? I ask his mom. He was not a good boy, she says, firmly. He would do exactly the thing you told him not to do. That’s just how he was. She says this very politely but precisely. She loves her younger son with a love patient and powerful but she does not forget, for example, what she refers to darkly as the motorcycle incident, of which the less said here the better. Everybody gets fascinated by something when they are young and some people pursue their fascination with tenacity all their lives and Dave pursued his, which was biology. He was fascinated by how living things worked and didn’t work. In college, in California, he studied how living things worked and didn’t work and then in graduate school, in Oregon, he studied how living things worked and didn’t work, and then he decided he wanted to be a doctor, to fix living things that weren’t working very well. He applied to the best medical schools in America but none of them agreed that he should enroll in their august halls of learning. He was counseled to wait a year and try again, to spend another year in graduate school and earn even more impressive grades and do a creative science or service project that would add value to his application, but Dave is a brisk and stubborn man, and he wanted to be in medical school right then, so he applied to, and was accepted by, Saint George’s University School of Medicine, on the island of Grenada, in the West Indies. * Grenada, the Spice Island, is famous for clove and cinnamon. Itis famous for nutmeg and ginger.Itisfamousfor its eccentric former prime minister, the Right Honorable Sir Eric Gairy, who led his tiny nation to independence from England in [54.227.104.229] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:11 GMT) The Infinite Number of Things 9 1974,whocommunicatedregularlywithextraterrestrials,who once told Time magazine that his opponents were negativity and he was positivity, and who told reporters that when his opponents hated him he replied by sending out waves of love to them. And Grenada is famous for being the smallest nation ever invaded by the United States of America. It was attacked by the United States Army at dawn on October 25, 1983, when more than a thousand Army Rangers parachuted onto the island by order of President Ronald Reagan, who wished to dismantle the Marxist government that had itself taken power by bloody coup the week before. The Army Rangers landed at Point Salines, on the island’s south side, and soon swept over the island toward Saint George’s University’s three campuses, where they secured the safety of 599 American medical students who were, says Dave, not in danger at...